"My Wife Was a Surrogate"

Any guy who supports his wife through a pregnancy can expect a major reward: a baby. His baby. But what happens when that child actually belongs to someone else? One man share's his family's journey to help another couple have a baby and his wife's brave choice to become a surrogate mother.

How could a man be okay with the idea of his wife carrying another man's child? What sane, adoring husband would hold her hand through a pregnancy and delivery, all to make someone else a father? The questions dogged me as I picked up the phone to call Jeremy Wallace, a 35-year-old former Air Force staff sergeant who helped his wife fulfill her dream of becoming a surrogate mother. It was easier than I expected to find Jeremy and other husbands in his position: The number of men who've helped their wives give birth to children for other families, while certainly small, is growing. In 2008, there were 1,395 children born by gestational surrogacy (in which the woman carries the child, but is not the egg donor) in the United States. That's nearly double the number from 2004, according to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. And many surrogates are married.

The husbands of these women tend to be middle-class, Midwestern fathers in their 30s, experts say. They are "confident and supportive," says Elaine Gordon, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist who has worked with surrogates for over 20 years and wrote a book for children born through surrogacy, Mommy, Did I Grow in Your Tummy? John Weltman of Circle Surrogacy, an agency in Boston, goes one step further, describing these husbands as "some of the most remarkable men you will ever meet."

Certainly, they are crucial to helping thousands of couples have children. No reputable agency will let a married woman become a surrogate unless her husband--who has to undergo psychological and financial screening--gives his written consent. His involvement is too important to the process for him to be anything less than fully on board, says Weltman: "I've heard extraordinary stories of men who have literally saved the day. He has to be in it." There can be medical emergencies and months of bed rest, in addition to givens like the twice-daily hormone shots these guys have to inject into their wives before they even get pregnant.

My knee-jerk suspicions melted away the more I talked to Jeremy, who comes across as not only sane, but sincere and well-adjusted. With broad shoulders and a charming Southern drawl, he still has the steady demeanor of a soldier (he served in the Air Force for 10 years). Jeremy left military life in 2006, and since then, he's worked at a variety of jobs, ultimately starting an appliance-repair business in San Antonio, where he lives with his wife, Dawn. They met when Dawn moved to Texas 16 years ago, and have been together ever since. It was a whirlwind romance, he tells me: They met in August, were engaged by Christmas, pregnant (surprise!) by January, and married in June. Today they have two daughters--Alexis, 14, and Rae-Lynn, 10--plus a niece (Amanda, 15) whom they adopted from Dawn's brother. Clearly, the Wallaces believe in family.

An idea is born

The couple's path to surrogacy began in 2003. Dawn's close friend Amber was having trouble conceiving, and "I offered to be an egg donor," says Dawn, a 5-foot-2-inch brunette with a warm, homespun presence. Jeremy gave his tacit approval, but Amber eventually became pregnant on her own. For Dawn, though, the idea of helping another couple have a baby had taken root. "Watching Amber go through all those emotional ups and downs was so hard," she says. "I thought, I could help someone else." She started researching surrogacy online.

After months of perusing articles and websites, she was ready to share her secret with Jeremy. "She was on the computer with all this information up on the screen, and she told me she was thinking about it," Jeremy recalls. "My first reaction was, 'Okay, that's kind of a shock,' because she's going from [the idea of] donating eggs for a friend to actually wanting to carry a child for somebody else." Jeremy knew how much a baby means to a couple who can't have children--he was adopted, and his parents had been in that very situation. But still, "that's a big leap," he says. They began to talk about the logistics of surrogacy, and naturally, finances came up. At the time, they were bringing in about $38,000 a year, so the $25,000 they'd get from Dawn's surrogacy--even if they'd lose almost half of it to taxes--represented a significant sum.

But the thought of his wife using her own eggs to produce a child with another man--even if there was no sex involved--and then carrying and delivering that child? It was still hard for Jeremy to grasp. "I felt like there wasn't any difference between that and a guy sleeping with her," he says. "I couldn't get over it at first."

Jeremy had everyday concerns, too. "I would have to care for her and do all the stuff for her as if this baby were mine, and it's not," he says. "I would be the one dealing with the hormonal aspect of it: the cravings, the moods, her getting really--excuse the word--bitchy. I thought about that too." But Jeremy didn't share these misgivings with Dawn. Instead, he told her he'd think about it. Privately, he hoped she would just forget the whole thing.

She didn't. "Getting pregnant was really easy for me, but it's not like that for everyone," Dawn says. "We had our kids; our family was complete. But I wanted to help people, and I like being pregnant." Five years went by, and then Dawn's on-again, off-again research led her to Circle Surrogacy. An agent there talked to her and Jeremy about the process and sent them information on gestational surrogacy (the most common type), in which the child would be the result of another woman's egg and sperm given by a male donor--eliminating any biological connection to Dawn. For Jeremy, that made the prospect more palatable. "I was able to look at it like she's just babysitting in a really drastic way," he says.

Step one: the screening process

Jeremy agreed to keep exploring the possibility of surrogacy, and the couple began Circle's screenings. "Anything that was private, we had to expose," says Jeremy. They passed the psychological interviews, where they were questioned by a counselor looking to make sure there was no tension or unease between them. All that remained was their finances. By that time, Jeremy was out of the Air Force and Dawn was working in child care. They were earning $50,000 a year combined, which met Circle's $40,000 annual income requirement and reassured the agency that the Wallaces weren't in it just for a payoff. It's worth noting, however, that the financial motive hardly seems viable once you do the math: The standard fee for a surrogate pregnancy is $25,000--not exactly a windfall after you factor in time (typically a year, including hormone shots and insemination), the physical toll on the woman, and the emotional toll on the man at her side. In many cases, a part-time side job would have a higher return.

Finding the right family

The Wallaces were approved, and Circle soon matched them with a potential recipient: a same-sex couple from Israel who were also registered with the agency. Jeremy and Dawn and their "match" quickly agreed to chat on the phone. That's when they learned more about each other, including the fact that the Israeli couple, Avishay and Avinoam Greenfield Caspi, had already adopted one son, then 8. They had signed up with Circle after they'd tried to add another child to their family and encountered restrictions on gay adoption in some of the countries where they had applied. Jeremy and Dawn enjoyed that initial conversation, and were thrilled when Avishay and Avinoam suggested visiting them in Texas.

Before the couple arrived, though, Jeremy and Dawn had to reveal their plans to Dawn's mother, who lives with them and would no doubt ask questions. "I started with, 'Dawn is doing something that is a little off the wall, but it's not unheard of,'" says Jeremy, who took the lead in the conversation. Telling his own very old-fashioned parents was a bit harder: "Going up to your mother or father and saying, 'Hey, Dawn's going to have a kid, and it's not mine'--that was something we had to ease into." He decided not to attempt it until Dawn was pregnant.

Breaking the news to their kids was a different kind of complicated. "We were driving around, and Dawn explained what we were doing," says Jeremy. From the backseat, daughter Rae-Lynn asked, "I'm getting a little brother or sister?" It took a moment for the girls to understand that no, they were not getting a sibling, but yes, Mom was going to have a baby. They soon accepted the situation, though, and it became their family's new normal.

With everyone in the loop, the Wallaces were ready to meet Avishay and Avinoam in person. For Jeremy, who was willing to help Dawn but not so passionate about their new "project" just yet, this visit would make all the difference.

"I got to see how [Avishay and Avinoam] were as a family, to get a better look at their values and thoughts on raising a child," he says. "I got to see how badly they wanted another kid." Jeremy remembers watching the couple's son play with his daughters in their three-bedroom home and thinking how the two families really weren't any different. "At that point I said to Dawn, 'We have two people here who really want a baby, and we can give it to them. Let's do it.'"

"I was happy that he finally came around," says Dawn. "I knew it would go a lot easier if I had his full support rather than just his help. There's a difference."

The visit also helped sway Avishay and Avinoam, who had their own concerns about Jeremy. "You look at his biography and he's this military man from Small Town, U.S.A.," says Avishay. "You wonder what his feelings will be about a gay couple, his wife doing surrogacy. But he was totally different from the stereotype we had in our minds. He was very warm, very sympathetic, very involved. We were taken by surprise." The couple paid close attention to how sweet Jeremy was toward Dawn--the way he looked at her, the way he held her hand. "We could tell he was a real family man," says Avishay.

Shots, doctors visits, success!

Just weeks after Avishay and Avinoam's visit, Jeremy found himself kneeling on his cold bathroom floor, preparing to stick Dawn with a three-inch needle full of hormones that would increase the chances of the pregnancy "sticking" once the embryos were implanted--one shot in the buttocks, one in the belly. It was a routine they would repeat twice a day for the next three months as Dawn prepared for the procedure. "I was so scared of doing something wrong," says Jeremy. He cracked jokes to ease their discomfort, but there was no hiding his uncertainty about whether or not they were doing the right thing.

"I kept telling her, 'I know this is something you want to do, and if you want to keep doing it, we will,'" he recalls. "'Otherwise you don't have to. We don't desperately need the money.'"

Three months later, the embryos were transferred to Dawn's uterus in a hospital room while Jeremy and Avishay waited outside. Jeremy describes how, as they saw the image of the fertilized eggs inside of Dawn, he turned to Avishay and said evenly, "Congratulations. She's pregnant." His reaction--or lack of it--is quite normal for husbands of surrogates, says Elaine Gordon. Already, Jeremy was feeling the detachment that Circle had prepared him for, and hoped for. Nothing complicates a surrogacy like a couple who forget that the baby isn't theirs.

A very risky pregnancy

At two months, just when Jeremy and Dawn had settled into the pregnancy, the doctor called saying that Dawn was having twins. It was good news for the fathers-to-be--more family to love!--but a worrisome prospect for Dawn, given her tiny frame.

Sure enough, by her fifth month, Dawn began to buckle under the weight of the babies. "My legs hurt, my stomach hurt, I was tired and cranky," Dawn recalls. "I felt the way I did at full term with my own children." At this point, the couple put their sex life, which had remained active during the earlier stages of pregnancy, on hold. Still, Jeremy says he never lost desire for his wife, no matter whose child she was carrying. "I found her as attractive as the day we met," he says. He showed his love in other ways: doing the housework, keeping the kids out of her hair, and making sure she ate well. At seven months, Dawn was put on bed rest, and Jeremy scaled back his work hours--something he could afford to do because of the Circle payment--to help out at home.

Then, truly scary news: Dawn was developing preeclampsia, a potentially life-threatening condition marked by a spike in blood pressure. Left untreated, it could lead to seizure, stroke, or organ failure for Dawn and the twins. The only cure is to give birth--and Avishay and Avinoam were in Tel Aviv, with no plans to come to Texas again for a month. Jeremy called them from the hospital after Dawn was rushed there in an ambulance. "You need to be here now," he said.

Because of the age and position of the twins, Dawn gave birth via C-section. The procedure took about 40 minutes, after which the babies, a boy and a girl born nine weeks premature, were whisked away to the NICU. "They pulled them out, got them wiped off, and put them in incubators," Jeremy says. "There was no stopping to say 'Hi.'" Dawn made Jeremy follow the babies to the NICU to make sure everything was okay. At that moment, the primary emotion he remembers feeling was relief: "We were just happy to have them out, everyone safe and healthy."

Dawn, recovering from her C-section, didn't make it to the NICU to meet the babies for almost two days. "I didn't have the maternal instinct that I had with my own children. With my kids, it was, 'That's mine,' and you just want to scoop them up and hold them," she says. "With the twins, it was just, 'Hey, I did good.'" Jeremy and Dawn were the twins' legal guardians while they waited for Avishay and Avinoam to arrive. During that time, Jeremy took a central role in caring for the babies. "It was a lot of checking in on them, signing papers, and transporting breast milk back and forth," he says.

Two happy families

The Israeli fathers finally made it to San Antonio 48 hours after Dawn gave birth. "Jeremy was the first person we saw," recalls Avishay. "He ran up to us and welcomed us, and then led us in to see the babies."

Over the next several days, the twins gained strength, and their dads were finally able hold them. But it would be a month before they could leave the hospital. When at last they were told it was okay to go home, the Wallaces threw them a party at a local restaurant. "Dawn's children joined us, and so did her mom," Avishay says. "We spent a couple hours just talking and seeing each other before we flew off." He and Avinoam couldn't be happier with the surrogate couple they chose. "They were wonderful, and I mean both of them," Avishay continues. "Jeremy was so involved and so in the picture--calling us, sending us emails and sonogram videos, making sure everyone was comfortable--it was really quite amazing."

Today, the families chat on the phone regularly, and they intend to keep in touch for the long haul. Jeremy and Dawn even visited the babies in 2009. The trip opened up their world in a way they couldn't have expected: The Wallaces, who had never needed passports before, found themselves in Israel speaking about their surrogacy experience to a room full of gay couples. "It was the neatest thing ever," Jeremy says. They also got to spend time with the kids. "The last time we had seen them, they were so small," says Jeremy. "Going from that to these chunky little babies, rolls all over, it was awesome. I felt like they were my niece and nephew." The Wallaces were so moved by the surrogacy process that they applied to do it again, but were rejected because of Dawn's medical difficulties with the twins.

Life has returned to normal for the Wallaces, but their relationship is different: They're much closer. "To see the parents with their babies and know it wouldn't have happened if it weren't for us is an amazing feeling," Jeremy says. He discovered "a new level of selflessness in Dawn after watching her go through a pregnancy for someone else. It speaks a different volume." In the end, Jeremy was right about never being able to think of his wife in the same way after surrogacy: He now sees her as stronger, more generous, and braver than ever before.